In reviving the greatest hits of its fifty year lifespan, the Hampstead Theatre’s celebratory season has never let the aging process slip from its view. The principles governing its curation have turned the theatre into a mausoleum, resuscitating relics to test their obsolescence. Ironic, then, that Philip Ridley’s sinister East End fable should emerge from the archives unblemished, given its protagonist’s alchemic resistance of wrinkles and responsibility.
On his thirtieth birthday Cougar Glass is celebrating yet another nineteenth in the traditional fashion – with cake, alcohol and a well-groomed schoolboy. Surrounded by the stuffed birds peering down from the shelves of the grizzled flat that he shares with the doting Captain Tock, Glass prepares to ensnare himself a younger model. The aviators are on, the vodka is strong and the porn is stashed, only half-concealed beneath the sofa. When Foxtrot Darling, his pubescent of choice, arrives with a copycat quiff and an air of idolatry, festivities seem set to run as planned. What he hadn’t reckoned on – much to the Captain’s delight – is the appearance of Sherbert Gravel, newly engaged to Foxtrot and anything but naive.
There are a host of obvious parallels lurking in Ridley’s 1992 play, both before and after. Strong whiffs of Pinter, Bond and Webster are always detectable and the arresting – if no longer scandalous – denouement clearly ushers in the In-Yer-Face theatre of the following years. Given today’s concerns about growing older, seen as much in Daily Mail lamentations of early-onset adulthood as the anti-aging elixirs that fly off shop shelves and television’s taut faces, it has almost gained weight in the intervening years.
Though there is much to savour about The Fastest Clock, from the black viscosity of its humour to the luscious cruelty of its language and its parade of deliciously warped characters, the narrative’s path offers no surprises once in motion. As soon as we have added Cougar’s explosion at any mention of his real age to the baby bump that appears silhouetted in the doorframe on Sherbert’s unexpected arrival, events can only unfold towards their fatal collision.
Accordingly, the interest lies in how and why the fallout occurs. As such, much of the responsibility rests with Jaime Winstone as the disruptive Sherbert and, on her stage debut, she handles it superbly. A mismatched neon nightmare with peroxide bunches sprouting from the sides of her head, Winstone resembles an unkempt, neglected Barbie caked in cosmetics to compensate. Fizzing round the room and policing the party in a discordant, infantile gargle, she calls to mind Alison Steadman’s iconic 1970’s hostess – only turbo-charged and off the leash, dispensing with niceties and nibbles in favour of vicious home truths.
Elsewhere performances are more uneven. Alec Newman is intelligently cast as Cougar – his tanned Givenchy-ad frame exposed by the weary eyes beneath his shades – but, in the stillness of the second-half, he leans closer to anonymity than the requisite omnipresence. As Captain Tock, Finbar Lynch is a delicate balance of likeable greasiness, forever trapped by the affections he knows to be irrational. However, Neet Mohan fails to trust in his own youth as Foxtrot Darling and ends up affecting the animated naivety of adolescence.
In a weaker production such a charade of boyishness might prove fatally hypocritical, but Edward Dick’s is heartily robust and – thanks to the pinpoint timing of Jaime Winstone – makes the most of its laughter lines.
Can a tasting menu ever really satisfy like a full three-course meal? Tangled Feet’s nomadic exploration of the small patches of earth we call our own serves up an array of tasty morsels but fails to condense into anything more. Delightful and well-constructed though each proposition is, the piece’s mind map structure prevents it from drawing any conclusions beyond total relativism. Home, it proffers, means many things to many people.
At times, the focus is on belonging and a quaint notion of community; at others, on the individual’s ties to a place or building. Momentarily, as a bespectacled estate agent tosses identi-kit accommodation to an eager crowd below, it muses on property as mere asset, before dwelling on the intangible comforts and security of one’s own space.
If Tangled Feet get away with such wide-angle panorama, it is because their sketches are often glazed with a political veneer. Tents with legs take on a fighting formation to ward off a newcomer, hinting at the hostility towards outsiders born of BNP policy. American invasions are evoked as the same tents are flattened to the sound of falling bombs, while the community that then tends to their broken properties seems that of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Having already pitched itself in town squares and docks, woodland and grassy plains, on high-streets and ferries, Home sits neatly in the musky gloom of the Southwark Playhouse. Here its seven white tents, each illuminated with a spearmint glow, seem a clumped settlement viewed from on high, as if wagons wrenched from a Western. At times, it is too reliant on their luminosity and lightness, insisting on repeatedly floating the tents around the space, but where it elevates hypothesis above hypnosis it does so with a thoughtful delicacy.
Never more so, in fact, than when the tents themselves acquire animal behaviour. One chases after its departing owner like a pet in distress; another wards off a returning inhabitant with a guard-dog’s snap and snarl. As the piece ends in a funereal procession – crumpled tents cradled in loving arms, their rods hanging limp like lifeless limbs – the importance of home, whatever its significance, is made abruptly and touchingly clear.
It’s been three weeks since I experienced Internal and, like alotofothers, I’m still mulling over its mechanics with a quiet regularity. Tube journeys, solo cigarettes and horizontal half-hours before sleep kicks in have all been invaded by puzzles of its logic and ethics. By refusing to be defined in black and white, to be one thing or the other, Internal brims with perplexing paradoxes. I’m still not sure I can put my finger on what, but something still rankles. I’m sure it’s unethical, I’m just not sure why. There must, I keep thinking, be something undeclared.
First, though, an admission that my response has changed since writing my initial review for Culture Wars. More precise, in fact, to say that it has softened or half-healed. At the time of writing, the experience was still fresh and the wounds still raw. The emotive nature of my writing holds true for the five days immediately after experiencing it. Then, I received a letter.
This letter, to be precise:
Dear Matt,
I wasn’t really aware of it in the moment, but afterwards it dawned on me that I treated you very harshly. I guess I was a little disappointed that you weren’t gay – because I thought you had a very charming, lovely smile and beautiful eyes. I’m sorry if you felt bashed – it’s completely my mistake.
Now the truth: you struck me as a very talented, sensitive guy with a lot of potential. I’d love to come visit you in London – or in Greece, watching a glorious sunset – and I promise, I will be nice...
Kisses,
Joeri
The effect of this letter – which feels ten times more precious as a tangible, hand-written object– was to bring closure. The rejection that I encountered during Internal, whereby Joeri passed a damning judgement after our shared ten minutes alone in the booth, was astute enough to really get at me. It scratched away for five days precisely because it threw traits of my personality that I recognise, dislike and resent back at me. I did feel bashed, but with (what felt like) shrewd observation and honesty that left me full of self-loathing: angry at Joeri, angry at Internal and Ontroerend Goed and, most of all, angry at myself. (Needless to say, I got very, very drunk afterwards.)
The letter brought closure because it tippexed over the immediate dissection and judgement that left me smarting. It admitted that it had been wrong. Or, if not wrong exactly, deliberately harsh. Spin and lies. This was calm reflection, not snap reaction. This was heartfelt. This was “the truth”.
Of course, it’s no such thing. The letter flatters and fawns, but, in reality, it’s no more true (or false) than any of the judgements passed in the performance-event. It made me feel better simply and solely because it said nice things. I wanted to believe it, where before I wanted to doubt. It is simply another mode of perspective, one that celebrates rather than castigates. It is equally and oppositely spun; equally performed and equally motivated.
Far be it from Ontroerend Goed not to leave a clue and, sure enough, there it is in the return address on the back of the envelope:
That the address given is not Joeri’s home address, presumably in Belgium, nor even his temporary residence in Edinburgh, but that of the theatre itself, goes some way to explaining Internal. Over at Postcards, Andrew Haydon recently wrote: “Having established that you have to interact with them, thus already breaking more traditional theatrical rules, you are then in the strange position of not knowing precisely who or what you’re interacting *with*.” I’m not sure I agree. Even as you experience it, it seems obvious that you are interacting with a creature or construct of the theatre, one with no existence or counterpart in the ‘real’ world. Internal never lets you (totally) forget that your opposite number is a performer and, as such, you know yourself to be interacting with a persona rather than a person. The rules of their individual performances – though they are not laid out in full – always make their presence known. We know that we are playing a game, we’re just not sure what the game is.
This is crucial to the success of Internal’s mechanics in two ways. First, our mode of working out the rules of the encounter in the moment is based on recognition according to prior experience and knowledge. We are led into a booth with another person, there’s a candle glowing, we sit across a table from our partner. Instantly, we identify the situation according to similar encounters in real life (or assumptions about them). Take, for example, the moment after two drinks are poured by the performer. Joeri’s signature tipple was Schnapps. Two shot glasses sit on the table. We lift them together. We chink and cheers. I throw mine down my throat, because that’s what we do with shots. Joeri sips. Then, he makes a point of this fact. “Oh,” he says, surprised, “I sip mine.” And there I am, further on the back foot.
In fact, Internal as a whole relies on a similar shift in the rules. We go from one situation, seemingly intimate and private, into another, public and ruthlessly exposing. Our actions and responses within the first section are appropriate to the situation we believe ourselves to be in and only later, once we discover an ulterior set of motives, do they seem inappropriate or misjudged. It’s not that we are suddenly made aware of the theatrical setting, of the fiction or unreality of those moments, as this is made clear from the start. Rather, it’s that we are duped into accepting it as one game, play along accordingly, and transpire to have been mistaken. Unless we enter forewarned, there’s no way we could have known. We trust and we are betrayed. Or, we assume (wrongly) and we pay the price.
Many responses have taken this to be the source of Internal’s wrongdoings. It fools us, it tricks us, it seduces us and then turns on us, therefore it’s unethical. For me, that’s fine. In fact, that’s the beauty of it. I like that it doesn’t pander to what we want from it. I like that it’s not afraid to fuck us over. Quite frankly, why shouldn’t it? Internal makes no claims of honesty, so we have no reason to expect honesty of it, do we?
Internal never lets us forget that it is a performance and, therefore, in some way pre-conceived. We sit and wait outside with four other people, nervously pondering what we might experience. We see five shaken, smiling, exhilarated figures come out of the space we are about to enter. We are ushered in and given a single instruction: “Stand on the white cross”. We pass a dressing room with five writing desks. We see walls covered in letters, a sign of its own history. The curtain goes up and we know the ten feet and five faces that appear to belong to performers – not least because the publicity tells us so. We know that they know more than us. We know that we are on a conveyor belt. We know that, no matter how much it looks and feels like it, this isn’t everyday reality. We know that they are in control. We know that the rules might not be the same inside as they are on the outside.
With all this knowledge, surely we have only ourselves to blame? Some have hung on this the ethical problem at Internal’s core, namely that the notion of risk is skewed. Internal, they say, requires its audience to risk something of themselves without itself risking anything. Internal reverses the usual directional order of risk in performance. Again, I don’t find this satisfactory. First, because why shouldn’t it? Doesn’t Rotozaza’s Wondermart do the same? Besides, I’d argue that we are more concerned with our risks than are the company/performers. To them, it is one of many; that you have risked is surely far more important than what you risk. Just as you don’t judge the other four audience members for their actions anywhere near the extent that you judge yourself, the information divulged, reflected and publicly revealed means more to you than it does to them or anyone else present.
Second, I think there is risk on the part of the performers, precisely because of the response that their behaviour could elicit. Sliding a photo of oneself across a table, baring one’s chest, kissing a stranger, asking intrusive questions are all actions that carry some element of danger. Yes, there is an imbalance in that the performers have signed up to take those risks knowingly and willingly, whereas we only discover ourselves to be risking something in the moment or, worse, after having done so. Again it’s only by changing the rules halfway through that Internal discloses the risks we’ve taken and, by that point, it’s too late. We’ve already risked and we’re facing the consequences.
But once again, why shouldn’t it? After all, theatre has no obligation to consistency and no obligation to subscribe to your expectations. Wouldn’t it be terribly boring, even pointless, if it did? More importantly, theatre makes no promises to play by the rules of life. In fact, it often relies directly upon our not doing so. Wouldn’t all theatre fail if we approached it in the same manner as everyday life? We could never suspend our disbelief, we could never read its signs, we would never accept it’s content.
This is the second crucial element of Internal’s mechanics; it depends on our status as audience, rather than simply as people. Internal would never work were it not labelled as a theatre event. It could not extract the information and actions that it needs in order for the second act to function. As audience we are always active; sometimes more so than others, but we always have some role to play. Even the most conventional theatre depends on our collaboration, our ‘going along with it’. So too does Internal, but, and here’s the kicker, it never declares this shift in our behaviour. It doesn’t forewarn us that we will be more inclined towards its charms than we would have otherwise been were it not framed as theatre.
By virtue of its being theatre, we assume certain things about Internal’s motives. Where in real life, we might approach it with guarded distrust, here we open up because we assume its motives are grounded in aesthetics rather than ethics, we assume that all it does it does in reverend care of us, ie for our benefit as audience, rather than for its own gratification or advantage.
For this reason, in hindsight, the two most telling moments of my Internal experience both involved doing something that, in that present moment, I was consciously unwilling to do. At the end, Joeri asked me to dance. Based on his actions immediately before, I genuinely did not want to do so, but there I was, dancing stiltedly, looking over his shoulder with gritted teeth, quietly seething until awkwardness set in and the dance dissolved. Two men just standing opposite one another, staring in silence, until he asked for my address. Again, in spite of consciously felt reservations, I wrote it down, even adding the bizarre qualifier: “Come visit (but be nice).”
I’m fine that Internal manipulates, because you’re aware of being manipulated even as you succumb to it. However, what it doesn’t reveal is our proneness to manipulation as audience. For this reason, Internal’s not as seductive, sly and charming it makes you think. It doesn’t need to be, because it preys upon the weak and that, for me, is problematic.
Over several years, Rotozaza’s practice has evolved to dispense with performers entirely. Their early work, such as Romcom or Five In the Morning (which I saw at Shunt in, I think, 2008), employed unrehearsed performers following a series of instructions delivered through a sound-system, either personally via headphones or collectively over speakers. Our role as audience was to witness other people interpreting and attempting to adhere to instructions that we may or may not be privy to.
Since 2007, the roles of audience and unrehearsed performer have coalesced, such that we receive and respond to instructions ourselves. Rotozaza have termed this new form autoteatro in reference to its self-generating nature. Once the soundtrack and instructions for use are completed, there is no need for any action on the part of the company beyond, perhaps, handing over an mp3 player or pressing play. Rotozaza might be pioneering the form, but many are playing with similar techniques. Slung Low’s Last Seen, Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images (shown as part of the BAC’s Burst Festival), the work of emerging artists Non Zero One and, even, Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke all hinge upon elements of audio-instructed participation. So, to Rotozaza’s two offerings as part of this year’s Forest Fringe programme: Wondermart and GuruGuru.
Wondermart asks us to reconsider the familiar. You stand outside a supermarket, any supermarket (or, to use its own terms, ‘high-density retail environment’) and look towards the building. The whispers of a cooling female voice mingle in between your ears and, almost instantaneously, your perception is transformed: the unquestioningly accepted dissolves. Iconic logos, automatic doors, advertisements and customers all become strangely conspicuous. You tune into an alternate frequency, as if no longer socially fluent. Normality is superseded. For a while we are privy to an alien perspective on our own lives, habitat and entire ecology.
For me, the strongest effect – almost judder-inducing, in fact – came whilst holding six pints of milk. In my ears, cows were mooing and a soft, bucolic voice was schooling me in milking techniques. How odd this staple now seemed. How unnatural. How thoroughly detached from source. How plasticised, concentrated and consumer-friendly? A product at once evidently processed yet entirely incised and excised of process. Not just milk, but Animal Juice™.
Yet, for all that Wondermart succeeds as an eye transplant, it doesn’t rid us of deeply felt obligations to the conventions of social behaviour. When it asks us to reach to the back wall of a freezer, to circle our trolley aimlessly or to abandon it half-filled in the aisles, we do so gingerly, awkwardly, even reluctantly. We never totally step outside the norm. Anarchy, though suggested and seemingly within reach, remains impossible. No matter how unfamiliar and perverse the environment comes to appear, it remains real and it remains ours. Though Wondermart makes us see the odd patterns of conformity, it never manages to entirely unshackle us from them. Not, of course, that it’s trying to do so.
(In fact, it preys upon precisely this when it asks us to consider stealing an arbitrary item. Hold it, it teases; feel it; notice the cameras and security guards; perhaps put it in your pocket; imagine leaving. Now, feel the sweat pricking at your skin.)
For all its reassurances that no one’s watching and your prescribed behaviour is inconspicuous – that, to any other shopper, you are just another shopper – Wondermart is inevitably a self-conscious experience. By granting access to another frequency, it segregates you from others. Your heightened perception extends to include yourself as seen by others. You feel your own presence as performer, even if only to an audience of yourself. You never forget your surroundings. You never forget yourself.
All of which makes GuruGuru an intriging and urgent enquiry into autoteatro as a form. Rotozaza provide a safe space, isolated from the real world in a way that Wondermart’s can never be, where you can behave according to its rules free from those of the world beyond. You see, where Wondermart changes your glasses, GuruGuru frazzles your brain.
Five of you, each allocated an alternative identity, sit facing a television wearing headphones in a clinically white room dotted with potted plants. On the screen, over the course of about twenty minutes, a face is generated as if at your bidding. First, you ‘decide’ upon its mouth, then its eyes, ears, hairstyle and beard. Of course, the voice in your ears is commanding your commands and the fixed video only appears to obey. The situation emerges into group therapy and each of us discovers ourselves to have assumed the identity (by which I mean fictional character/history) of an actor entirely reliant on instructions provided through headphones. Mega-meta (to be momentarily facetious).
It is, however, much more than that. Being sustained according to this aural drip of instructions feels both comfortable and enjoyable. We are set a task, even one as simple as “look at Eddie,” and we carry it out, relaxing into performance and growing more confident in execution. As the soundtrack mutates, such that the different modes of instruction and information contort and converge, the experience becomes increasingly disorientating. One is not sure whether to obey or absorb. The headphones are backfiring, yet still we listen and attempt to understand. We become reliant and addicted. Content and form mirror one another seamlessly.
The coup comes at the end when, with an incomprehensible garble spewing into your ears, the soundtrack starts looping and we keep sitting there. Once every while, in the midst of its morphed soundbites, the words ‘Its over’ recur. Yet still we sit there, waiting for clear instruction and information, reliant. It took a good five minutes until – slowly, uncertainly – I reached for the headphones and stopped the cycle in a moment that seemed somehow momentous. A break from the Matrix; a discombobulated return to freedom.
What GuruGuru demonstrates is Rotozaza’s awareness of the mechanics and effects of their form. While it is at once a comment on our disillusioned subscription to self-help models and on our limited freedom in a world determined by advertising, it is also an investigation of autoteatro itself. As GuruGuru demonstrates, we seem to become protagonists even as our agency diminishes. Autoteatro gives the illusion of empowering precisely by relieving us of power. It makes us the centre of our own universe. We follow the instructions of GuruGuru unthinkingly, almost hypnotised or brainwashed, performing only to ourselves. Similarly, the voice in Wondermart seems to arise from within our own minds: we feel its thoughts as our thoughts. In this way, Autoteatro affords us the opportunity to applaud ourselves.
As such, it feels a self-centric form of theatre. It indulges the self without itself being self-indulgent. At the moment, the work feels biased to the participant as performer rather than as audience. We are too concerned with our own activity to truly register the presence or actions of others.
All of which reminds me of Nick Ridout’s discussion of Levinasian philosophy and its implications for performance in Theatre & Ethics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). In response to the genocide of the Nazis, Levinas elevates ‘the infinite other’ over the self and the drive towards being or ‘Being’. Theatre, then, is permitted an ethical status according to “the centrality of the encounter with the ‘face’.” [Ridout, Theatre and Ethics]
“For Levinas the ‘face’ is never any particular face but rather the otherness of the other as it appears to us in the encounter. It carries with it, in its nakedness and vulnerability, the injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and confers upon us an infinite responsibility – up to and including the laying down of our life – towards the other.”
I wonder whether autoteatro can make manifest this connection with the other or, rather, whether it appeals to us precisely by removing it, by focussing all its energies on us, by flattery, flirtation and ego-inflation. If it can be located at all, it seems to take place in one’s head. Your focus shifts – at times, it is sharpened but very specific, almost like tunnel vision; at others your eyes seem to glaze over as focus turns inwards. Your relationship with the world is diminished. Our journey (or the process of journeying) is elevated above the things we pass and the people we encounter.
I suppose what I’m saying is that ‘I’ is always present in theatre, even when it is not directly invoked in the manner of autoteatro or other interactive modes of performance. Theatre exists perhaps, in the relationship between other and self, performer and spectator. This is, in fact, incredibly clear in Rotozaza’s early work. In witnessing others attempting to follow instructions, we cannot but be aware of our own projected response, i.e. the choices we would have made in their stead. Thus, through the recognition of difference, we become hugely aware of possibilities and choices. We see the ‘how’ (and maybe also the ‘why’) of their actions in a way that our own don’t register as strongly when we react impulsively as in autoteatro.
At the heart of all this, really, is the question as to whether the performative elements of our participation overpower our role as audience. At the moment, I have similar queries about game-based work, such as that emerging from the alliance of theatre and live RPGs growing out of events like Hide and Seek and companies like Coney.
Of course, perhaps all this is just what happens to me. Others may have different experiences when under the influence of headphones. Perhaps Etiquette (and even an earlier two-player version of Wondermart at the BAC Burst Festival), which I haven’t participated in, entirely answers the question of the other by placing you at a table with it and forcing interaction, but I suspect that it remains a similarly inward-looking experience. Autoteatro is certainly an innovation that I am keen on, both experientially and theoretically, but – as with any larvae-like form in development (Aren’t forms always in development?), there are challenges to be faced ahead.
Written for Culture Wars
